If a disaster struck tomorrow, are you ready for it? Are you sure you thought of everything? I cannot count the number of times something happened, and I thought that I should have been able to anticipate that. It can be a big benefit to get another viewpoint on your disaster plan. No matter how well you think you’ve covered yourself, someone who thinks about things differently than you do can often see something you don’t. Here’s a checklist of

A few years ago, I did a blog post series dedicated to disaster recovery (backups, restores, corruption, etc). 31 blog posts dedicated to the topic (though not 31 days in a row) have been compiled into a 75 page eBook that can be downloaded from the new website SQL Server Best Practices.

If you’ve been living under a rock, you may not have noticed how frequently SSMS is getting updated. The SQL Team is really rocking over at Microsoft putting out fixes and enhancements fast and furious. When CUs (cumulative updates) and SPs (service packs) come out, it makes sense to install the latest SSMS update at the same time (if you put SSMS on your servers). If applying both an SP or CU along with an SSMS update, order does matter.

It’s T-SQL Tuesday again, and this month’s host is Kendra Little (blog|@), and the excellent topic selected by Kendra is Interviewing Patterns & Anti-Patterns. When I logged on to Twitter this morning, the first tweet I saw was for Brent Ozar’s (@BrentO) post The DBA Job I Turned Down. It was another great post from Brent, and I was inspired to write about a similar topic. For my contribution to this T-SQL Tuesday is 3 Jobs I Didn’t Take, and

Join me Friday, July 21, 2017 for a day of Real-life SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting as part of SQLSaturday Columbus at Otterbein University Campus Center in Columbus, OH. Register for SQLSaturday Columbus before it fills up, and check out the early bird pricing for the pre-conference sessions the day before. Description: Tired of talking about theory and want to hear about real production SQL Server issues and the methods I used to troubleshoot them? We’ll take a look at real

It’s time for another iteration of the blog party known as T-SQL Tuesday. This month’s theme is Shipping Database Changes hosted by James Anderson (|@). Head on over to John’s announcement post and join in with the party by writing your own post or by just reading those that are participating. The topic of database changes put me in mind of a recent discussion on a professional SQL Server related discussion list. Someone sent an email declaring the DBA role

This topic has come up several times recently, so I feel the need to blog on it. As the person who wrote the book on Database Mirroring, it will probably come as a surprise to many of you that I believe that log shipping is a much better tool for database migrations than database mirroring. I’m not just talking about the fact that database mirroring is deprecated (since SQL Server 2012) and log shipping is not. Both are still in

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation for the 24 Hours of PASS event on May 3rd. This iteration of the event was wholly focused on security, and my presentation was Securing SQL Server Processes with Certificates. If you missed it, the sessions were recorded and will be posted on the PASS website soon. In the meantime, the slide deck and demo code can be downloaded below. Slide deck: SecuringSQLServerProcessesWithCertificates_final.pptx (801 KB) Demo code: SecuringSQLServerProcesses_demo.zip (2KB)

Welcome to T-SQL Tuesday #88 being hosted this month by Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan (blog|@KennieNP). This month’s topic is the “daily (database-related) WTF”, and I want to share some of my top WTF moments. If you would like to participate in this month’s blog party, go to Kennie’s invitational blog post: Announcing T-SQL Tuesday #88 – The daily (database-related) WTF. You did what to your database mirroring? I was working on an operations team at Microsoft, when I got a call

One of the problems with whitepapers is that they get out of date pretty quickly. It’s important to update them regularly to keep them relevant. A few of my older whitepapers have been updated by my friend and colleague Kenneth Fisher (blog|@sqlstudent144). I helped with some technical review and provided the original content, but the rewrites were all his. You can download the updated whitepapers using the links below: DBA Tactics for optimizing SQL Server Network Performance Initializing Replication from